5 ms·

Having lived through MAD, I still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. (upon reflection, having also lived t

Having lived through MAD, I still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. (upon reflection, having also lived through the pandemic, I can believe it)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nyokodo 3y ago
> so bent out of shape over mere terrorism 9/11 was an attack on the greatest symbols of American power on American soil. Suffice to say, Americans are not accustomed to that and they went mad with rage and fear. Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America worked through that trauma. It wasn’t just mere terrorism but also the psychological result of American strategic isolation.
- jameskilton 3y ago
  I like to put it slightly differently: 9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in modern history. We are still running scared.
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > We are still running scared. Not as compared to 9/11 through ~2017. America has largely returned to the geopolitical indifference it had in the 1990s but with much greater exhaustion for direct foreign military intervention and cynicism about strategic alliances.
    - asdff 3y ago
      Foreign policy wise the ship never was off course at all from the doctrine its had for decades. In terms of the American people though, its obvious how the event has severely damaged us both in terms of how we think about our fellow people, and the sort of restrictions and surveillance we have imposed on ourselves in the name of safety since.
  - pydry 3y ago
    It certainly fulfilled its objective of pulling the US into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires".
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  I don't think most people considered the WTC as a symbol of anything other than tall buildings. Or at the worst, a symbol of unfettered capitalism. It seems to me it was made into that symbol after the fact to get everyone's feathers rustled. In 2000, if you were to ask someone what building represented the success of the US, I'd bet the majority would say Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, or Sears Tower. Maybe that answer would be different for New Yorkers though, idk. The psychology that should be noted was the government and media whipping the populace into a psychotic frenzy which made us willing to murder a quarter million people in a country that had nothing to do with the attack. The fact that this isn't brought up every time 9/11 is mentioned is a travesty.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    I think you have the cause and the effect mixed up. The government didn't have to 'whip us up' we did that entirely on our own. The government was able to go places they never could because of that fervor, but they had at most a marginal role in creating it. You're wildly misremembering how much fear there was on day 0, before the government had a chance to do anything. We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. The amount of energy required to destabilize the system, when applied in just the right way, is shockingly small.
    - nyokodo 3y ago
      > We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. This is massively overstating the impact on the west, and America specifically. Obviously it massively disrupted life and civilization in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it lead to the death of 10s of 1000s of military personnel and degraded civil liberties in America and elsewhere. But it had no substantial impact on “civilization” in the west.
      - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        Apart from seeding a culture of paranoia and xenophobia, and converting the Anglosphere from a mid-trust culture into a low-trust culture. See also, airport security theatre.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  3000 civilians were killed in a single attack. It's not about the buildings or any symbolism, it's about the tragic loss of life in first hand. Everything else second. If you're looking for symbolism, you have the January 6 insurrection.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Fixed: Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America co-opted the trauma to start a generation of unjustifiable wars and massively reduce civil liberties.
- latentcall 3y ago
  Yep. The world generally felt for us after 9/11, and then the wars started and that really affected public perception. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with it and destabilized an entire region and didn’t find the guy that orchestrated the whole thing for an entire decade. All that along with torturing prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made us look even worse. Not to mention it really created an “us vs. them” environment in the American homeland which is still ever present if not getting worse. I think Bin Laden was counting on “death by a thousand cuts” aka creeping normality and I believe that was largely successful. Americans seem to have partly turned on each other over political differences. People now have an even larger distrust of the institutions in this country. Empathy seems to have taken a sideline. I’ve seen families broken up and almost experienced it myself. People now spend so much time online in their echo chambers and sometimes refuse to even converse with “the other side”. This goes both ways. With all of this happening I think of this part of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
hammyhavoc 3y ago
"mere terrorism"? It was an attack on a civilian target. Pearl Harbor was a military installation. The USA had never faced anything approaching the scale of 9/11. The WTC 1993 attack and OK City bombing in 1995 didn't come close. It became very apparent how complacent the USA had become. Unlike a state attacking another state, pinning down where these people were getting their orders from was difficult. Considering what your age must be, I'm surprised you struggle to understand the difference between an openly militarized nation versus terrorist cells that could be anywhere and anybody. There's no coordinates to punch into a MAD system when it comes to terrorists. If it was so easy, years wouldn't have been spent searching for the likes of Bin Laden.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Scale? Less than 3000 people died during 9/11. That is nothing compared to anything else that's happening in the world. With or without the US's involvement. Edit: he U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars 144 times as many CIVILIANS were killed by the US.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    It isn't about body count, it's about a handful of people taking control of aircraft and causing mass destruction with minimal effort, energy and resources expended. It also isn't about whether it is "nothing" compared to what is happening elsewhere, the topic at hand is the USA. The rest of the world isn't what is being discussed. There were weaknesses in the US national security threat model. It wasn't a major consideration that someone would hijack a plane and fly it into NYC, the major assumption was that an attack would come from another nation, and it would be military, and it would be detected as hostile in aerospace. Guise of a civilian aircraft? Yeah, that was a gaping hole. Come on, the fucking Pentagon had a plane flown into it on the same day. It's one thing for gov to get hacked by teens, it's another thing to have a terrorist org do all that in the space of a few hours.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
scotty79 3y ago
United States builds their identity through their enemy. It started in WWII and worked so good that they almost immediately adopted communists as their new enemy. When Soviet Union eventually surpisingly collapsed despite US constantly proping them up as credible enemy, they started losing identity. Fortunately, accidentally seeded terrorist groups cropped up and did significant enough damage. US eagerly elevated them to the position of the new main enemy providing all the necessary PR. Even the name Al Qaeda was pretty much invented by US trying to figure out who hit them. Before US started using this name it was a name of random training camp. As nice and safe the terrorists were as an enemy, everybody knew that it won't last long. It just wasn't convincing and terrorists, apart from few events, were pretty much worthless. So US naturally picked next solid enemy, China for their next hopefully long and prosperous cold war. Having an enemy is super important for US politics, their industry and social structure. It gives them excuses for protectionism. It gives them ability to have an alternative to increasingly impoverished civilian customers when it comes to stimulating innovation and industrial growth. It allowes them to give jobs to people that in purely civilian economy wouls just raise unemployment and unrest. All the culture of US is soaked in hero/villain dynamics that consolidates society and prevents from asking too many questions in the presence of a villain. The problem now is that US is starting to drop the ball. World caught up with their advantage of being the only major economy not damaged by WWII. Unfortunately the current US enemy is on more capable side. So this time, maybe for the first time, the US is in the real danger. Maybe isolationist tendencies of Trump and his fans are not such a bad thing. Maybe US should go back to pre-wwii state. Times when US could credibly pretend they are on top of things, not just bit ahead of the pack, are pretty much over.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Kind of right, kind of not. There are unarguably factions in the US that consider fascists like Putin to be friends, not enemies, and would happily consider an international alliance. And US force-projection has few defences against the kind of subversion of key figures that Putin has decided to specialise in. The US will continue in some form. But the post-Enlightenment liberal/rationalist/progressive current in the US and Europe is in deadly danger.
wolverine876 3y ago
> Having lived through MAD It's still going on, and things are more unstable with Russia and the US Republicans opposed to treaties or disarmament and embracing aggression and violence on principle, and China adding a third nuclear force to balance.
sgjohnson 3y ago
> still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. that would be because nukes are completely useless against anything assymetrical
refurb 3y ago
Terrorism has brought down governments, or nearly so. Shining Path in Peru is a great example. It doesn't take many bombings (that don't even kill people) to bring a system nearly to a halt. It's one reason why Singapore has very strict security rules targeting terrorism. Not because of mass casualties, but because of the instability it would bring, dragging down the economy, creating social unrest. Terrorists aren't stupid. They know terror works.

Having lived through MAD, I still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. (upon reflection, having also lived through the pandemic, I can believe it)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nyokodo 3y ago

> so bent out of shape over mere terrorism 9/11 was an attack on the greatest symbols of American power on American soil. Suffice to say, Americans are not accustomed to that and they went mad with rage and fear. Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America worked through that trauma. It wasn’t just mere terrorism but also the psychological result of American strategic isolation.

jameskilton 3y ago
I like to put it slightly differently: 9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in modern history. We are still running scared.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > We are still running scared. Not as compared to 9/11 through ~2017. America has largely returned to the geopolitical indifference it had in the 1990s but with much greater exhaustion for direct foreign military intervention and cynicism about strategic alliances.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Foreign policy wise the ship never was off course at all from the doctrine its had for decades. In terms of the American people though, its obvious how the event has severely damaged us both in terms of how we think about our fellow people, and the sort of restrictions and surveillance we have imposed on ourselves in the name of safety since.
- pydry 3y ago
  It certainly fulfilled its objective of pulling the US into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires".
bongodongobob 3y ago
I don't think most people considered the WTC as a symbol of anything other than tall buildings. Or at the worst, a symbol of unfettered capitalism. It seems to me it was made into that symbol after the fact to get everyone's feathers rustled. In 2000, if you were to ask someone what building represented the success of the US, I'd bet the majority would say Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, or Sears Tower. Maybe that answer would be different for New Yorkers though, idk. The psychology that should be noted was the government and media whipping the populace into a psychotic frenzy which made us willing to murder a quarter million people in a country that had nothing to do with the attack. The fact that this isn't brought up every time 9/11 is mentioned is a travesty.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I think you have the cause and the effect mixed up. The government didn't have to 'whip us up' we did that entirely on our own. The government was able to go places they never could because of that fervor, but they had at most a marginal role in creating it. You're wildly misremembering how much fear there was on day 0, before the government had a chance to do anything. We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. The amount of energy required to destabilize the system, when applied in just the right way, is shockingly small.
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. This is massively overstating the impact on the west, and America specifically. Obviously it massively disrupted life and civilization in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it lead to the death of 10s of 1000s of military personnel and degraded civil liberties in America and elsewhere. But it had no substantial impact on “civilization” in the west.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      Apart from seeding a culture of paranoia and xenophobia, and converting the Anglosphere from a mid-trust culture into a low-trust culture. See also, airport security theatre.
carlosjobim 3y ago
3000 civilians were killed in a single attack. It's not about the buildings or any symbolism, it's about the tragic loss of life in first hand. Everything else second. If you're looking for symbolism, you have the January 6 insurrection.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nathancahill 3y ago
Fixed: Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America co-opted the trauma to start a generation of unjustifiable wars and massively reduce civil liberties.
latentcall 3y ago
Yep. The world generally felt for us after 9/11, and then the wars started and that really affected public perception. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with it and destabilized an entire region and didn’t find the guy that orchestrated the whole thing for an entire decade. All that along with torturing prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made us look even worse. Not to mention it really created an “us vs. them” environment in the American homeland which is still ever present if not getting worse. I think Bin Laden was counting on “death by a thousand cuts” aka creeping normality and I believe that was largely successful. Americans seem to have partly turned on each other over political differences. People now have an even larger distrust of the institutions in this country. Empathy seems to have taken a sideline. I’ve seen families broken up and almost experienced it myself. People now spend so much time online in their echo chambers and sometimes refuse to even converse with “the other side”. This goes both ways. With all of this happening I think of this part of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

hammyhavoc 3y ago

"mere terrorism"? It was an attack on a civilian target. Pearl Harbor was a military installation. The USA had never faced anything approaching the scale of 9/11. The WTC 1993 attack and OK City bombing in 1995 didn't come close. It became very apparent how complacent the USA had become. Unlike a state attacking another state, pinning down where these people were getting their orders from was difficult. Considering what your age must be, I'm surprised you struggle to understand the difference between an openly militarized nation versus terrorist cells that could be anywhere and anybody. There's no coordinates to punch into a MAD system when it comes to terrorists. If it was so easy, years wouldn't have been spent searching for the likes of Bin Laden.

jbverschoor 3y ago
Scale? Less than 3000 people died during 9/11. That is nothing compared to anything else that's happening in the world. With or without the US's involvement. Edit: he U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars 144 times as many CIVILIANS were killed by the US.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  It isn't about body count, it's about a handful of people taking control of aircraft and causing mass destruction with minimal effort, energy and resources expended. It also isn't about whether it is "nothing" compared to what is happening elsewhere, the topic at hand is the USA. The rest of the world isn't what is being discussed. There were weaknesses in the US national security threat model. It wasn't a major consideration that someone would hijack a plane and fly it into NYC, the major assumption was that an attack would come from another nation, and it would be military, and it would be detected as hostile in aerospace. Guise of a civilian aircraft? Yeah, that was a gaping hole. Come on, the fucking Pentagon had a plane flown into it on the same day. It's one thing for gov to get hacked by teens, it's another thing to have a terrorist org do all that in the space of a few hours.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

scotty79 3y ago

United States builds their identity through their enemy. It started in WWII and worked so good that they almost immediately adopted communists as their new enemy. When Soviet Union eventually surpisingly collapsed despite US constantly proping them up as credible enemy, they started losing identity. Fortunately, accidentally seeded terrorist groups cropped up and did significant enough damage. US eagerly elevated them to the position of the new main enemy providing all the necessary PR. Even the name Al Qaeda was pretty much invented by US trying to figure out who hit them. Before US started using this name it was a name of random training camp. As nice and safe the terrorists were as an enemy, everybody knew that it won't last long. It just wasn't convincing and terrorists, apart from few events, were pretty much worthless. So US naturally picked next solid enemy, China for their next hopefully long and prosperous cold war. Having an enemy is super important for US politics, their industry and social structure. It gives them excuses for protectionism. It gives them ability to have an alternative to increasingly impoverished civilian customers when it comes to stimulating innovation and industrial growth. It allowes them to give jobs to people that in purely civilian economy wouls just raise unemployment and unrest. All the culture of US is soaked in hero/villain dynamics that consolidates society and prevents from asking too many questions in the presence of a villain. The problem now is that US is starting to drop the ball. World caught up with their advantage of being the only major economy not damaged by WWII. Unfortunately the current US enemy is on more capable side. So this time, maybe for the first time, the US is in the real danger. Maybe isolationist tendencies of Trump and his fans are not such a bad thing. Maybe US should go back to pre-wwii state. Times when US could credibly pretend they are on top of things, not just bit ahead of the pack, are pretty much over.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Kind of right, kind of not. There are unarguably factions in the US that consider fascists like Putin to be friends, not enemies, and would happily consider an international alliance. And US force-projection has few defences against the kind of subversion of key figures that Putin has decided to specialise in. The US will continue in some form. But the post-Enlightenment liberal/rationalist/progressive current in the US and Europe is in deadly danger.

wolverine876 3y ago

> Having lived through MAD It's still going on, and things are more unstable with Russia and the US Republicans opposed to treaties or disarmament and embracing aggression and violence on principle, and China adding a third nuclear force to balance.

sgjohnson 3y ago

> still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. that would be because nukes are completely useless against anything assymetrical

refurb 3y ago

Terrorism has brought down governments, or nearly so. Shining Path in Peru is a great example. It doesn't take many bombings (that don't even kill people) to bring a system nearly to a halt. It's one reason why Singapore has very strict security rules targeting terrorism. Not because of mass casualties, but because of the instability it would bring, dragging down the economy, creating social unrest. Terrorists aren't stupid. They know terror works.